Although it is disturbing that women are increasingly excluded from participation in an important if diminished dimension of gay commercial and social life, women's bars have by no means disappeared from urban queer life. The institution of the lesbian bar is far from obsolete. Indeed, gay and lesbian bars continue to display an impressive vitality.

Since the 1980s, bars have continued to undergo a process of specialization, with different establishments catering to different ethnic subpopulations and communities of interest, such as leathermen or Bears or country music aficionados or transgendered individuals. Some bars especially cater to a younger crowd, while others cater to a predominantly older group; some attract a mixed clientele of men and women, while others cater to a single sex.

Sponsor Message.

While nearly all the "back room bars" have been closed, bars that feature dancers or strippers abound, especially in resort areas, and many other bars are oriented around cruising and the pursuit of sex. Other bars, however, are neighborhood institutions that serve a core clientele who come principally to socialize with friends. Many bars perform more than one of these functions simultaneously or alternately.

Despite the decline in the centrality of bars to gay culture, in many places across the country, gay and lesbian bars remain the most (and sometimes only) visible manifestation of glbtq life. In such circumstances, the role bars continue to play in building community should not be underestimated.

Bars of all varieties fill an important role in glbtq communities by providing sponsorship and hosting space for dozens of community organizations, such as sports teams and choirs, and special events, such as Pride celebrations and contests. They also provide much needed advertising revenue and distribution points for the gay press. They are also a locus of efforts to combat the spread of HIV and STDs.

While bars no longer retain a monopoly on gay socialization, their financial wherewithal and symbolic power allow them to retain important functions in contemporary community life.

Queer Bars as Targets

Because gay and lesbian bars are among the most visible manifestations of gay life, they are, sadly, also frequent targets of homophobic rage against the gay and lesbian community.

Examples of such rage include numerous cases of (often unsolved) vandalism, arson, and bombings of gay and lesbian bars all over the world. In 1973, for instance, 32 people burned to death in the Upstairs Lounge, a New Orleans gay bar, in a fire set by an arsonist who has never been identified. In 1979, during Anita Bryant's anti-gay "Save Our Children" campaign, a lesbian bar in St. Louis, Mor or Les, was firebombed.

Other examples include such incidents as occurred in 1980 when a deranged man, Ronald Crumpley, claiming that he was acting under God's orders, walked into a gay bar in New York with a submachine gun and proceeded to kill two men and injure six others. In a similar incident in 2001, Ronald Edward Gay, a Vietnam-era veteran who described himself as a "Christian soldier," went on a shooting rampage in a Roanoke, Virginia gay bar, killing one person and injuring six others.

Another religiously-motivated attack on a gay bar is that committed by right-wing extremist Eric Rudolph, who, in addition to bombing Olympic Park in Atlanta in 1996 and an abortion clinic in Birmingham, Alabama in 1997, also bombed an Atlanta gay bar, injuring five people, in 1997.

Gay bashers, including serial killers and sexual predators, often target gay bars, selecting their victims from patrons who leave establishments catering to gay men and lesbians.

The frequency of attacks on gay and lesbian bars and their patrons is a measure of the vulnerability of glbtq people in a homophobic society. As symbols of gay and lesbian openness, and often of gay and lesbian pride, bars that cater to the glbtq community are regarded as particularly galling by those who hate and fear homosexuals.

Precisely because gay and lesbian bars remain the most visible manifestations of a gay and lesbian presence, attacks on these institutions are intended to intimidate and frighten the entire glbtq community. Conversely, the homophobia that the attacks represent makes the need for gay and lesbian bars all the more obvious. In such venues, gay men and lesbians find respite from the larger society's incessant assaults on our self-esteem.

Notable in the twentieth century both for its pioneering efforts in homosexual emancipation and for the subsequent Nazi persecution of homosexuals, Berlin is now a major participant in the struggle to gain legal recognition of gay relationships.

Butch-femme identities are controversial and difficult to define with precision, but both roles subvert prescribed gender and sexual expectations; ultimately, the butch-femme dynamic is a unique way of living and loving.

Historically, cabarets and revues have been much more likely to mention or imply same-sex desire than the "legitimate" theater; and same-sex desire has been less frequently condemned in cabarets and revues than in mainstream plays.

Since the advent of the Internet, lesbians, gay men, and sexual and gender nonconformists of all kinds have been able to use a variety of computer-mediated communications to meet and network both on- and offline.

"Leather" is a blanket term for a large array of sexual preferences, identities, relationship structures, and social organizations loosely tied together by the thread of what is conventionally understood as sadomasochistic sex.

As part of its agenda to preserve an "Aryan master race," Nazism persecuted homosexuals as "asocial parasites"; more than 100,000 men were arrested on homosexual charges during the Nazi years, with 5,000-15,000 gay men incarcerated in concentration camps.

Sex workers range from well-organized professionals who work for escorting agencies, perform in pornographic films, or manage independent escort businesses to those who engage in unpremeditated and sporadic cash transactions resulting from casual encounters.

In a series of five interlinked pulp novels set in Greenwich Village and its homosexual bars in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Bannon provides an important record of lesbian life in a period when few women dared speak openly about homosexuality.

Rubin, Gayle. "Elegy for the Valley of the Kings: AIDS and the Leather Community in San Francisco, 1981-1996." In Changing Times: Gay Men and Lesbians Encounter HIV/AIDS. Martin P. Levine, Peter M. Nardi, and John H. Gagnon, eds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. 101-144.

Trumbach, Randolph. "London's Sodomites: Homosexual Behavior and Western Culture in the Eighteenth Century." Journal of Social History 11 (1977): 1-33.